An ex-atheist friend told me his conversion.
He was walking in Spain 🇪🇸 and heard beautiful music coming from a building. He went in and fell on his knees knowing immediately God was real.
The building: a Church
The music: “Tantum Ergo.”
The moment: Benediction
I love our faith pic.twitter.com/VZ9BvLnZGO— Augustine Mario (@UgonnaMario) March 26, 2022
Faith is a gift by the grace of God. One which we are free to reject or accept. It can occur in the most unlikely people very swiftly.
Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing’, he went on, ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.’ To understand the shattering impact of it, you need to know the man…
CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy, recalling his conversation with Thomas Dewar Weldon during the evening of April 27, 1926.
I see no one commented on this. I’m sure I’m not alone having clicked on the story, enjoying it, and carrying it around with me. Thanks for posting this.
27 years ago, before my baptism and confirmation, I was having difficulties believing in the Real Presence, The wise old priest who was catechizing me, explained about transsubstantion, substance and accidents, but while I understood intellectually, it didn’t move me. Catechumens had to attend a 40 hours devotional service. As the procession with the monstrance moved down the center aisle, they were singing Tantum Ergo. I remembered enough of my high school Latin to translate “Praestet fides supplementum Sensuum defectui.: into “Let faith provide a replacement of the defect of the senses.” And my eyes filled with tears, and I knew that the little cracker in the golden container was indeed the body, blood, soul and divinity of Our Lord. Grace given and received. The power of music. Thanks you St. Thomas Aquinas.
This is what worries me the most about bad modern church songs. The old hymns had rich theology. I always think of the line “Here on Earth both Priest and Victim / In the Eucharistic feast” sung to a mathematically-perfect musical line. That’s the kind of thing that stays in the brain, even for kids who only attend sporadically. Relatedly, a Catholic friend who grew up atheist used to talk about realizing the meaning in all the Christmas hymns he’d learned.